Interactive TV Brings New Tricks to the Old Box

Interactive TV. Enhanced TV. ITV. Whatever you call it, it's the couch potato's dream: a boob tube that allows you to e-mail mom, order pizza, and watch any episode of The Beverly Hillbillies whenever you want.

Finally, after years of hype and promises, this show is hitting prime time. From big-leaguers Microsoft and America Online to your local pay television provider and upstarts TiVo and Replay, a range of companies are scrambling to compete for the right to let you save a season's worth of The West Wing while e-mailing your pals about an EBay auction.

Details and emphasis vary by service. AOLTV, for example, throws in its famed instant messaging and other features of its online service. TiVo and Replay will leverage their existing digital video recorder (DVR) services to enable you to watch what you want, whenever you want. In some areas you'll have unprecedented video-on-demand service. Whatever their focus, these services won't be cheap: Most require you to pay $300 or more for a set-top box, plus monthly service fees on top of your current pay TV costs.

Your choices will depend mostly on the type of pay TV service you have or can get: Microsoft's UltimateTV, for example, will work with digital services. At its launch this holiday season, it will be available only with DirecTV satellite service. Many other services limit you to Internet access via an old-fashioned 56-kilobits-per-second modem and phone line, which might be a problem in some living rooms. You also need a fairly large TV screen to handle the picture-in-picture displays of features such as content-related Web sites and pop-up menus.

Still, serious channel surfers who would like to harness the power of digital technology to render their hours of self-imposed sofa sitting more fun and informative will love interactive TV. (See "I Want My iTV.")

The Microsoft Show

Among the various interactive TV initiatives, perhaps the most ambitious is Microsoft's UltimateTV, which marries a full-featured DVR to WebTV-like Internet capabilities.

Expected to launch by year-end, UltimateTV requires a $399 set-top box that you'll buy retail. Thomson/RCA and Sony are the initial vendors; Sony's box comes with a keyboard (you'll have to buy the dish separately), and a DirecTV dish accompanies RCA's (keyboard sold separately). You'll also have to pay a monthly service fee of $10 or $15 on top of a DirecTV programming package (which starts at about $30 a month).

Digital video recorder features look particularly impressive: You can record up to 35 hours of programming, which you ferret out either by browsing or by searching the electronic program guide. When you are ready to watch a recorded show, you simply click the My Shows option in a menu that appears when you turn your set on. UltimateTV works only with digital services (AT&T is committed to supplying 7.5 million UltimateTV licenses to digital cable subscribers starting this year); as a result, Microsoft says, recordings are superior in quality to those made from analog TV services. You can also record one show while watching another--something not all DVRs permit you to do.

The $10 monthly UltimateTV service includes three hours of WebTV-style Internet access via a built-in 56-kbps modem. That's enough to let you dash off an occasional e-mail or surf to a program-related Web site during commercial breaks. If you already have an Internet service provider, you can pay Microsoft an additional $5 per month in exchange for unlimited use of the account with UltimateTV. Microsoft says that it imposes the charge because you will be accessing its servers for some content. (See "Want to Watch Windows TV?")